We’ve just heard from Golden-Bristled Boar author Jeff Greene as he wraps his reading tour. He tell us the readings are drawing good crowds. Jeff is an excellent reader, so please make plans to attend if you’re nearby. The two remaining stops will be at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History in Pacific Grove, CA on March 13 and the First Presbyterian Church in Corvallis, OR on March 15. Both readings are at 7:00 PM.
Been Here Before
As the EU approves a second bailout for the failing Greek economy, we thought it would be a good time to hear from historians John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffler. Why, you might ask, would we consult experts on the ratification of the U. S. Constitution for their take on Europe’s current condition? Because their most recent project, an English-language edition of Jürgen Heideking’s The Constitution before the Judgment Seat, reveals many compelling parallels between Europe’s current fiscal challenges and those faced by the founders in the days of the early republic.
Q: Why should this book on the debate over the adoption of the U.S. Constitution more than 200 years ago be of interest to Europeans today?
A: It’s true that history does not repeat itself. But Americans in the period from 1781 to 1789, when the Constitution went into effect, had to confront many of the problems that Europeans confront today: political, constitutional, recession, currencies, public debt.
Q: Is that why Professor Heideking wrote this book, to become involved in the European debate?
A: No. Jürgen wrote the book to coincide with the Bicentennial of the American Constitution, which was celebrated in 1987-1988. He wrote it as pure history, and as anyone who reads it can tell, it is a masterful piece of historical writing by a great historian. But when in 1979 he contacted Professor Merrill Jensen—who was editing The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution at the University of Wisconsin at Madison—about coming to do research in the project files, Jensen encouraged him, as Jürgen recalls, “to take a fresh look at the formation of the American Constitution,” which had been debated voluminously already, “from the unbiased perspective of an ‘outsider.’”
Q: But was Heideking aware of and moved by the history of Europe, and did he see a relevance to the American experience of 200 years ago?
A: Yes, to both. He had done his first graduate work at Tübingen on modern European history. As he says in his Introduction, “Every politically minded individual, particularly a native of central Europe, with its painful, cataclysmic history, must regard it as a supreme intellectual challenge to study a constitutional system which for over two hundred years has continually provided the foundation and framework for the political and social life of a great nation.” Jürgen considered the Constitution as a great success, and the founding of the nation on that Constitution as “one of the most important and influential events in world history,” and therefore well worth studying. His father had served in the German army during the war and Jürgen was born barely two years after it ended, and he believed that “in light of modern-day experiences with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, we can perhaps understand better than ever before the significance of British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s assessment of the American Constitution as ‘the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.’”
Q: But were the issues in America in the 1780s relevant to modern-day Europe?
A: Just look at the way Jürgen described the issues in America, and you decide for yourself. He says “To the extent that the debate [over the Constitution] dealt with such fundamental issues as the nature of government, sovereignty, the separation of powers, federalism, representation, political participation, and human rights and liberties, it has lost none of its relevance or importance.”
Q: Specifically, did Heideking believe that this debate had anything to tell us about the attempt to establish “Europe” today?
A: Yes, he did. Although he wrote this book as history and not as advocacy, he wrote that “it was my sincerest hope that the book’s significance would extend beyond [the celebration of the American Bicentennial], and that the process of European integration might benefit from the example of the thirteen American states, which, in free and open debate crafted a constitutional framework for a common future.”
Q: Has his hope been realized?
A: That is for Europeans to determine. But Jürgen has presented the great and complex issues he mentions truly, with great insight, and with profound knowledge. To the extent that we can learn from history, he has done all that a historian can do. It is now up to the people of Europe to decide whether they can benefit from the American example.
The Constitution before the Judgment Seat is available now. Kaminski and Leffler also serve as editors of our digital edition of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, published by our electronic imprint, Rotunda.
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Figuring Out Jefferson
This being the week of President’s Day, we thought we would ask one of our favorite authors, Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, about her recent reading on the third president.
Q: We at UVA Press, along with Maurizio Valsania, were delighted to learn that you were reading his latest book, The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment. How did you come to his work?
Gordon-Reed: My good friend Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia had read the book in manuscript and suggested I read it.
Q: Jefferson is well known as an enlightenment thinker. Did anything in Valsania’s book surprise you?
Gordon-Reed: Well, it’s such a fresh take on Jefferson. It moves beyond the “He was a man of contradictions” approach. That is true, but as Valsania shows, a lot of what Jefferson says and does hangs together.
Q: You co-wrote the introduction to Monticello historian Cinder Stanton’s “Those Who Labor for My Happiness” with Peter Onuf. Can you elaborate on how you’ve learned from and collaborated with her in her research on the lives of Jefferson’s slaves?
Gordon-Reed: I showed up at Monticello with a first draft of my book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. I sat in her office and played what we came to call “20 questions” or sometimes more or less. I drew on her unparalleled knowledge of TJ and Monticello to answer questions I had about some of the things the historians I was writing about had said about life on the plantation.
She has been a good sounding board for my ideas and interpretations. We do not always agree, and that is good. It’s so much better with a give and take, especially with a person who is so knowledgeable. Everyone has an opinion, but all too often those opinions are formed without anything approaching a sufficient base of knowledge. Information—basic information—is key. But that takes work and long years of study—all things she has done. It has been great to learn from her.
Q: As you know, a Smithsonian exhibit opened in January on Jefferson and slavery. Do you feel that the popular reception to the exhibition will be significantly different than it would have been fifteen or twenty years ago, before you wrote Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?
Gordon-Reed: Well, I do think the Hemings-Jefferson relationship is not so big a deal to people now that the people who are most knowledgeable about Jefferson have incorporated it into the story of his life. People now want to think about the implications of it all.
Q: In the Boston Globe recently, you said you find history books more “vivid and exciting” than novels, and there have been much-cited essays by novelists such as Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen on why American novelists don’t tackle big subjects. Do you think that big social novels are the answer, or is there some other reason why contemporary novels don’t grab your attention?
Gordon-Reed: I’m not sure that every book should be a “big social” novel. I do like Wolfe, but more of his “new journalism,” the Wolfe of the 1970s. I suppose I’m just not as interested in the characters so much as I am interested in figures of history. I start reading and it’s fine. But then I wonder do I care enough about this person to continue? Most often, I answer no. I did love Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead; that held my interest—and as I said in the Globe interview, I do like Christopher Isherwood’s novels. It’s not the novelists, though. It’s me.
Q: What’s next for you in terms of research and writing?
Gordon-Reed: I’m working with Peter Onuf on a book about Jefferson. I have another volume of the Hemings family saga. Then it’s on to a two-volume biography of Jefferson.
LBJ Wins PROSE Award
Winners of the 36th PROSE Awards were announced on February 2, and our electronic imprint, Rotunda, was honored for its digital edition of The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson, which won 2011 Best eProduct in the Humanities. Sponsored by the Professional Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers, the PROSE Awards recognize excellence in books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. The complete list of winners is here (scroll down for digital publications). It’s been a very good 2012 so far for our Lyndon Johnson publication: the PROSE Award follows its being named one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in January.
Library Journal‘s Cheryl LaGuardia is currently offering her blog readers a login for free-trial access to The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson. Hurry and check it out—the login is good for one week only.
The online edition of The Presidential Recordings includes hundreds of hours of presidential tapes covering the major issues of the LBJ administration, from the War on Poverty to the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War. Each conversation is fully transcribed and annotated, and accompanied by its audio file, allowing users to hear all of the collections conversations. This multimedia presentation also includes photo and video galleries, a linked timeline, and powerful XML-based searching ability.
CNN on Salomé
To celebrate Joseph Donohue’s new translation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé the Press recently collaborated with the university’s drama department on a staged reading of the one-act play. You can watch a clip from the performance here.
CNN blogger Eric Marrapodi attended the event, and his report—including an illuminating interview with Donohue—has just been posted on CNN’s Belief Blog. You may read the Salomé post here.
Although an English speaker and writer, Wilde composed his play in French. Donohue sought to correct earlier translations written in a deliberately archaic idiom of traditional biblical language: his translation offers a fresh and briskly contemporary approach to Wilde’s play by drawing on the more spare and colloquial English of current American speakers. (Marrapodi provides an excellent example of the different translations in his blog post.) Donohue also addresses Wilde’s impressive fluency with the classical world. People who know the playwright mainly as a coiner of clever phrases will be surprised to learn that, at Oxford, Wilde was “a superb classical scholar.”
In case you’re wondering, the portrait above of Salomé and John the Baptist is by renowned illustrator Barry Moser. Moser created 23 engravings for the new edition, which is available now in hardcover and as a signed limited edition.